


Here's a Truck Stop Instead of St. Peter's

by Balder12



Series: These Clothes Don't Fit Us Right [2]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Bondage, Heaven, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-11
Updated: 2013-02-11
Packaged: 2017-11-28 22:43:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/679690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Balder12/pseuds/Balder12
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dying doesn't change Sam's life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Here's a Truck Stop Instead of St. Peter's

**Author's Note:**

  * For [counteragent](https://archiveofourown.org/users/counteragent/gifts).
  * Inspired by [choosing my confessions](https://archiveofourown.org/works/368329) by [De_Nugis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/De_Nugis/pseuds/De_Nugis). 



> A/N: This story was written for Counteragent to fulfill her bid on Fandom Aid. It's a sequel to These Clothes Don't Fit Us Right (The Maddening Loop Remix), a remix of Choosing My Confessions by De_Nugis.  
> A/N 2: This story fulfills the Sam/Cas square on my SPN Pairing Bingo card.  
> A/N 3: The title is from "Man on the Moon" by R.E.M.  
> A/N 4: Many thanks to cherie_morte for betaing.

Sam is twelve. Dean has them practice shooting in the woods all day. When lunch comes around they eat potato chips and beef jerky standing up, while Dean lines up more beer bottles on the fence. By late afternoon the ground is slushy with melted frost, and Sam’s hands burn every time he touches the freezing gun metal. He barely feels it. Dean has gradually pulled away from Sam now that Sam is old enough not to need his older brother’s constant, watchful eye. A sixteen-year-old boy has a world of interests that don’t include a little brother—girls, parties, the shady friends he smokes pot with under the bleachers. Today, though, all that he’s interested in is Sam. Dean adjusts and corrects, teases and encourages, until Sam finally gets it right. He knocks off six bottles in a row at 500 yards. The pride that flares in Sam’s belly is warmer than the contents of the bottle that Dean passes him in celebration.  
  
  
**********************************************  
  
Sam is thirty-one. He’s pulled over for the night by the side of a Louisiana highway. It’s too hot to sleep, and the air’s so thick that the stars ripple like he’s seeing them through water. He’s lying on the hood of the car, stripped down to a t-shirt and shorts, and he still feels like he’s under a wool blanket. Beside him, trench coat firmly in place, Cas looks like he’s never even heard of sweat. Sam stares at the sky, but no matter how many times Cas describes the Heavenly constellations, Sam can’t seem to find their shape. Finally Cas takes Sam’s hand in his own and points it up at a star, then moves it over to the next, and the next, connecting the dots. Together they draw out a set of symbols that Sam sees in the summer sky ever afterward: Reaper, Serpent, Penitent, Angel.  
  
************************************************  
  
Sam is twenty-eight. He and Dean drink whiskey from a flask through an entire Aerosmith concert. The street is bracingly quiet after the crush of bodies inside. Sam won’t let Dean drive, and Dean won’t let Sam drive—“If I’m drunk you must be wasted, Officer Friendly”—so they end up trying to walk back to the motel. They’re immediately lost and too buzzed to care. They wander through unfamiliar neighborhoods, clutching each other’s arms for support, while Dean yowls, “I don’t wanna close my eyes, I don’t wanna fall asleep,” out of tune. Sam makes shushing noises, but he’s laughing so hard that he’s no quieter than Dean is. The neighbors must hate them. Caught in the light of the street lamp, Dean’s cheeks are flushed and the tips of his ears are pink under his tousled hair. It’s probably just the whiskey, but he’s holding onto Sam’s shirt like it’s his whole world.  
  
*************************************************  
  
Sam is nineteen. Jess is standing in front of him barefoot in a pair of cutoffs and an old soccer team t-shirt. There’s paint on her nose. She’s beautiful. “Oh my God,” she says, “I can still see it.” She’s right. Under the layers of primer the stars and crescent moon that she painted on the wall of her freshman dorm still shine through. “Maybe midnight blue was a bad color choice,” Sam says. “Good thing you’ve got the sexiest guy on campus to help you hide the evidence.” “Really?” she says. “When’s he going to get here?” Sam’s got some smartass answer, but it dies on his tongue. The Ani Difranco song on Jess’s stereo has been interrupted by a man speaking Russian. It sounds like radio interference, but he thought they were listening to a CD. He’s about to say something, but Jess smiles and kisses him, and he gets distracted.  
  
**************************************************  
  
Sam is eight. He and Dean are sitting on a motel bed with a deck of cards and a family sized bag of M&Ms. Dean’s teaching him how to play Texas Hold ‘Em. Red M&Ms are worth ten, greens are five, yellows are one. Browns aren’t worth anything because they’re gross. Dean deals the cards, and Sam checks the list of hands Dean wrote down for him on the motel stationary. A full house! He beams, and Dean rolls his eyes. “Sammy, do you remember what I said about a ‘poker face?’” Sam tries to make his face blank like real poker players do, but the harder he tries the more his lips twitch up, until he’s giggling like mad. Dean groans. “I fold.” Sam scoops in the M&Ms he’s won. Suddenly a chorus of voices rises through the motel wall, almost intolerably loud. Sam wouldn’t have thought so many people could fit into one of these dinky motel rooms. “Is it a party?” he asks Dean. It doesn’t sound like a party. More like a fight. A woman’s crying. Dean ignores the question in favor of  
stealing Sam’s M&Ms. It’s almost like he can’t hear the people at all. It’s weird.  
  
**************************************************  
  
Sam is twenty-three. He and Dean rent a stack of their favorite action movies from the Sioux Falls Blockbuster. They’re horrified by each other’s choices and spend the rest of the day arguing over who’d win in a fight: Chuck Norris or Jet Li. It’s the stupidest disagreement they’ve ever had. Jet Li would kick Chuck Norris’s redneck ass. Bobby shakes his head like a disapproving mother while Sam and Dean bicker about Sam’s refusal to buy licorice, but once Invasion USA starts he settles in like he hasn’t already seen every Chuck Norris movie a million times. Dean dozes off in the middle of Fist of Legend—which sucks because it’s Sam’s best argument—but when his head drops against Sam’s shoulder, Sam can’t find the will to wake him up. Bobby’s in the kitchen getting them all another beer when Sam hears someone walking around outside the window. “Guys, I think we’ve got company,” he says. Bobby doesn’t come back, and Dean keeps his sleepy death grip on Sam’s arm. Dozens of shadows move behind the curtain, but when Sam pushes it aside he finds nothing except the empty wasteland of Bobby’s junkyard. “I’m serious,” Sam says, more urgent now. “Something’s happening out there.” No one answers.  
  
************************************************  
  
Sam is thirty-four. The autumn air smells like frost and wood smoke, and the leaves are so red they look fake. The sleeve of his jacket brushes against the rope burn on his wrist every time he moves. The sting is a small comfort. Cas is beside him on the park bench, completely absorbed in the bag of sweet potato fries that Sam got with his eggplant sandwich. A flock of waxwings lands on a nearby holly tree to feed, then moves on to the next one in perfect unison. Sam barely notices, but Cas is delighted in the way that he sometimes is by ordinary things. He starts to explain “emergence” to Sam, drawing a diagram in the dirt with a stick. Sam recovers his fries and does his best to follow along. It has something to do with the waxwings, and a species of firefly in South America, and traffic patterns in New York, and how they’re all profoundly connected. Honestly, Sam doesn’t get most of it. The birds really are beautiful, though.  
  
A shadow passes over the sun and the day turns cold. There are a lot of people in the park. Like, weirdly a lot, and they’re all just standing around. Sam turns to ask Cas what he makes of it, but Cas is gone. Sam gets up. The people stretch out on all sides, as far as he can see. He can hear them now, too, like the volume has been turned up—a million voices crying, screaming, talking to no one. Some people are on their knees, bent over in prayer. A few are half-naked, their clothes shredded as if they’ve been torn off.  
  
Sam stumbles over a woman lying face down on the ground. At least, he assumes it’s a woman. The figure is completely shrouded in ankle length black hair. He rolls her over to check whether she’s hurt and recoils. She’s dead white and painted like a doll. She grabs his wrist with frenzied strength when he tries to pull away and babbles in Japanese. Her teeth are black. He’s studied Japanese with Bobby, but the only word he recognizes is “daughter.”  
  
She cuts off mid-sentence and drops Sam’s wrist, suddenly indifferent. Sam tries to rouse her again, but she’s like a wind-up toy that’s run down. He can’t even get her to blink. He looks up and sees how many others like her there are around him, ignored and stepped on by the crowd.  
  
There’s nothing Sam can do for them alone. He needs to get help. Which means he needs a car. That’s okay. He’s pretty sure he has one. Or maybe Dean does. He’s not too clear on that. There’s definitely a car, though. Sam looks around, but there’s nowhere that he could have parked. No parking lots, no streets, no buildings. No trees, or lakes, or mountains, either, for that matter. Just a white sky and a vast plain of people packed together so closely that Sam can barely stretch out his arms.  
  
Sam tries to remember where he left the car, but he can’t. He can’t even remember whether he drove here. Wherever here is. Hadn’t he been in a park? Sam pushes harder against his memory, trying to pin down the last thing that he does remember. Panic rises in his chest when he realizes that he can’t.  
  
It’s not amnesia. He knows that he’s Sam Winchester. He remembers his life: Dean, Dad, Bobby, Cas, Jess. But his memories are like photographs dumped out of a shoebox, jumbled together without context. No matter how he strains to put them in order, he can’t find the connecting thread. Sam doesn’t think that’s how memories are supposed to work. Something is very wrong with his brain.  
  
He takes a deep breath. He can figure this out. He just needs a few minutes away from the crush of bodies, the constant collision with shoulders and hips, the clutching hands at his back and in his blind spot. A small clearing opens up in front of him. The boundary isn’t marked by any physical sign, but the crowd respects it just the same. Sam steps into it, relieved to have even a few square feet to himself. At the center of the rough circle a dozen children sit huddled together, whispering. They’re maybe six or seven, and they’re so filthy that Sam can’t tell if they’re boys or girls. One of them looks up when Sam steps into the empty space. It’s the first time that anyone in this place has made eye contact. After a moment it turns back to its companions.  
  
Logical explanations. There must be some. Maybe he and Dean were on a hunt. That’s a thing they do, isn’t it? Sam thinks that’s a thing they do. He and Dean were on a hunt, and Sam’s brain got scrambled by some kind of supernatural fuckery. And all these people are here because . . . Huh. Sam’s still working on that one.  
  
But Dean. If they were on a hunt, then Dean must be here somewhere. Maybe Dean’s brain got scrambled, too. That’s why he hasn’t tracked Sam down yet. So Sam’s going to find him instead. And then they’ll find the car, and then they’ll fix Sam’s brain, and then they’ll come back here and help the people. That’s a good plan.  
  
Sam’s taller than almost everyone around him, and when he stands on his toes he can see a fair distance in every direction. No sign of Dean. He calls Dean’s name, but his voice is swallowed by millions of others. He’s bracing himself to plunge back into the crowd when the screaming breaks out.  
  
These screams, panicky and united, are different from the scattered cries he’d heard before. The people around him are pointing at the sky. Sam looks up. A vast storm front has rolled in, and black mountains of cloud lit from within by flashes of lightning sit improbably in the middle of the white sky. As Sam watches, two discs fly out of the storm and hover overhead, throwing everything below them into shadow. They’re easily the size of city blocks, and have a glossy blue sheen that’s closer to gemstone than metal. Lights blink on and off in their depths.  
  
Sam knows what they are. He’s known since he was five. And even as confused as he is he knows that he can’t be seeing them. They don’t exist any more than big foot does. And yet there they are, massive and undeniable as goddamned buildings. Flying saucers.  
  
Sam almost throws himself to the ground, but the crowd is roiling with the urge to escape, and he’s more afraid of being trampled if a stampede breaks out than he is of whatever the UFOs might do to him. The people around him fall silent in awe or terror, and for a long moment the tension twists tighter as everyone waits for something to happen. Then there’s a sharp, inhuman screech and the flying saucers shoot off at a right angle, disappearing over the horizon. The air smells like an electrical short.  
  
Sam is still frozen by shock—because  _what the fuck_?—when a voice says his name. Sam turns and finds Cas standing six inches behind him. Thank God. Cas can help him look for Dean. But before Sam gets the chance to explain about Dean, and the UFOs, and the people, and his memories, Cas reaches for his forehead with two fingers. Sam backs away, out of reach.

“I’m not leaving without Dean,” he says.  
  
Cas drops his hand, confused. “Dean’s not here.”  
  
“He has to be,” Sam says. “We were on a hunt and we got separated. I need to find him.”  
  
“Dean wasn’t with you on that hunt.” Cas glances behind him, and hastily looks away when the children stare back. He turns toward Sam again, but his eyes watch the crowd. “Dean’s alive. He’s fine. You’re the one in danger.”  
  
Every word of that could be true. But it could also be a story to get Sam to go quietly. Cas isn’t above manipulation if he thinks it’s for Sam’s good.  
  
“If Dean’s really fine, why didn’t he come for me himself?”  
  
Cas just looks at him. “You don’t know where you are.” It’s not a question.  
  
“No, I just woke up here.” That’s not exactly what happened, but Sam doesn’t have a better way to describe it. “My memory is screwy. I mean, I know who you are, I just . . .” Don’t remember how we met? Don’t remember the last time I saw you? Sam can feel in his gut exactly how bad that is. But he can’t worry about it now.  
  
“We need to find Dean,” Sam says again. He can only deal with one thing at a time, and right now he’s dealing with that.  
  
Cas’s demeanor changes. He holds his hands out in a placating gesture and walks toward Sam carefully, the way you’d approach a wild animal. Sam doesn’t trust it. He can see the tension in Cas’s frame. Cas is ready to jump on him and drag him out of here as soon as he gets close enough. Sam backs away until he comes up against the edge of the clearing.  
  
“Dean’s home,” Cas says. The tone is far too gentle. It doesn’t sound like Cas at all. Besides, Sam’s pretty sure that can’t be true. Home? He hunts through his memories and draws a blank.  
  
“I don’t have a home,” Sam says, somewhere between an instinct and a blind guess. Cas flinches, and Sam knows that he’s right.  
He sees the lie form behind Cas’s eyes: “I’ll take you to him.”  
  
Sam plunges back into the crowd and instantly there are a half dozen people between them serving as human shields. Cas hesitates at the edge of the clearing, but Sam keeps backing away and finally Cas follows.  
  
It’s an awkward chase. There are too many people on all sides to allow either of them to run, and Cas seems unable or unwilling to use his mojo to catch up. For his part, Sam is as afraid of losing sight of Cas as he is of getting caught by him. If Cas’s mojo really isn’t working, then even a moment out of each other’s visual range would be enough for them to lose track of each other completely. Sam can’t allow that. He has to keep stopping to wait for Cas to almost reach him before he starts to back away again.  
  
“I’m not going anywhere until we find Dean,” Sam says as he retreats.  
  
“Dean’s not here,” Cas says, his attempt at gentleness already wearing thin. The people around Sam barely notice him, but every person Cas collides with stops to look. He leaves behind a wake of staring eyes. One of the children from the clearing has followed him. Cas keeps glancing between it and Sam, like he’s unwilling to turn his back on either one. “I’ll explain everything as soon as we get somewhere safe. We can’t stay here.”  
  
“No,” Sam says. He stumbles as he backs into a child. Somehow three of them have gotten behind him. “You can say anything you have to say right here.”  
  
The child trailing Cas catches up to him and reaches for his sleeve. Cas backhands it hard. It reels back a couple of feet and then resumes following him, unfazed. Everyone around Cas is watching him now.  
  
“That child—“ Sam says.  
  
“That’s not a child.” Cas looks back at it, genuinely frightened. “We don’t have time for this. We need to go right now.”  
  
Cas lunges for Sam. Sam tries to jump out of the way, but he trips over one of the children and falls backward, cracking his head against the ground. His vision is still gray at the edges when a child wraps itself around his right arm and bites down on his hand. Flesh and sinew shred under its teeth with a wet ripping sound. Sam’s thumb joint is half severed by the time he’s got breath to scream. He raises his left hand to take a swing and another child locks onto it. He’s sure he’ll leave behind a couple of fingers if he ever gets it back.  
  
It should be easy to fight creatures so small, but they’re impossibly strong for their size and they hang on with the fierce will of pit bulls. It takes all his strength to wrestle himself up onto one knee. The people around them have closed in on Cas, hundreds of hands grabbing and tearing. Sam wants to help, but the children are dragging him down. He doesn’t even see the third child until it bites through his jugular, and then he’s choking on blood. It feels strangely familiar.  
  
In the pain-bright moment before black-out, Sam sees Cas break free of the crowd and lay a hand on his ankle.  
  
***********************************************  
  
Sam is standing in Bobby’s kitchen. The sky outside the window is a friendly shade of blue. Sam’s hand rises to his throat, but it’s whole again.  Cas is in the doorway, unreadable as a stone angel.  
  
“What the fuck?” Cas opens his mouth to answer, but Sam’s not done. “No. What the fucking fuck?” Sam’s pretty much just shrieking now. “What were those things? Why are there fucking UFOs? What did you do to my brain? Where are we? Where’s Dean? Who were those people? Did you really just leave him there to get fucking eaten?”  
  
Cas waits, in case Sam has more to say. After a moment he says quietly, “I’m not sure how much you remember right now. But you said you know me. And you know that I came for you, in spite of the danger to myself. Can you imagine anything that would move me to abandon Dean in that place?”  
  
Sam can’t. But if Dean wasn’t lost in the crowd . . . “Where is he? I want to see him.”  
  
Cas studies him with a tilt of the head, like Sam’s a specimen pinned down in a collector’s case. Sam hates that look. Finally Cas says, “This happens to people in your position when they wake up. This confusion. It passes. You already know where you are. You just don’t want to.”  
  
“No, I don’t. Just fucking tell me.” Cas doesn’t answer. Fine. A guessing game it is. Sam leans back against the sink.  
  
“I’m dreaming. You can walk in dreams.” No response. “I’m in a coma. A djinn got me.” Sam pokes around the edges of his golden hued, useless pile of memories. He tries to reach back beyond it, to a time before his existence went soft focus. He can feel what he’s missing, vast and dark and just out of reach.  
  
Bobby’s kitchen looks exactly like Bobby’s kitchen. It smells like burned coffee and sautéed garlic, just like it should. There’s not a single half-melted spatula out of place. But it feels wrong. Sam’s felt this kind of wrong before.  
  
His mind catches on an impression of cold and pain, and he knows that it doesn’t belong with all the shoebox photos. There was snow. His head was resting on Dean’s knees. Cas’s coat was next to him, neatly folded and dark with stains. He was choking on blood.  
  
“There was a tree,” Sam says. Cas looks down. “I’m . . .” Sam trails off. He can’t bring himself to say the word ‘dead.’ He feels fine.  
  
As soon as he finds his last memory the others click into place behind it sickeningly fast. It’s like he’s reliving his life as a reverse free fall roller coaster, plunging backward while the lights come on and show him all the horrors he’s forgotten. Sam’s thirty-three and he’s giving up on all the family he’s got left because he drags disaster behind him like a ball and chain. Sam’s thirty-one and he’s staring at the ceiling while Cas fucks him, pretending the cock inside him belongs to his brother. Sam’s twenty-nine and he’s asking the gas station attendant for directions he doesn’t need because he hasn’t spoken to another human being in days. Sam’s twenty-seven and he’s falling into the mouth of Hell. Sam’s twenty-six and he’s leaving Ellen and Jo to blow themselves up on the floor of a convenience store because he set the universe on fire. Sam’s twenty-five and he’s sucking blood out of the arm of a half-naked demon like it’s mother’s milk. Sam’s twenty-four and he’s watching Dean get ripped apart by hell hounds. Sam’s twenty-two and the woman he loves is burning on the ceiling. Sam’s eighteen and he’s cutting off his past like a diseased limb. Sam’s nine and he’s hiding under the covers with a loaded .45.  
  
Years ago, Sam and Dean went hunting for a hodag in a Wisconsin cave. They came to a place where the only way forward was through a small, crumbling hole in the rock face. Dean went first, and of course he wriggled through like a goddamned eel, the scrawny bastard. Sam got stuck halfway, unable to lift his head, his right hand pinned under his body. He could feel the whole weight of the earth pressing down on his back, crushing the breath from his chest, and it frightened him in a way no monster ever had. Half a mile underground is a hell of a place to find out that you’re claustrophobic. He’d wanted to scream and flail against the rock, but he hadn’t. He’d shut his eyes and gone quiet instead, his entire consciousness filed down to a single point:  _don’t panic_. Dean had made stupid jokes about sasquatches and a big dick in a small hole while he crawled back to pry Sam out, but his easy confidence-- _I’ll get you out of here if I have to grease you up like a pig at the county fair_ —and his hand on Sam’s hair were enough to lift the weight of the world until Dean found the loose thread on Sam’s jacket that had snagged on the roof and hauled Sam out.  
  
Sam feels that tingle of rising claustrophobia now. His life is a half mile of sheet rock bearing down on him and he can’t breathe. He wants to scream and beat at the walls until they give way and set him free. He wants his brother to come to him here where he’s trapped and tell him that he’s going to be all right. He aches for Dean like it’s physical pain, like it’s a puddle of blood and intestines at five minutes after midnight on the floor of a study in New Harmony, like it’s 127 Tuesdays in a row. Because it doesn’t really matter which of them has died, who’s on what side of the dark glass. Dean’s just as gone either way.  
  
Sam doesn’t scream. He sinks down into one of the kitchen chairs, shuts his eyes, and goes quiet. He cries because he can’t not, but it’s contained in the circle of his arms on the table, in the little closed circuit of his body. He can hear the creak of Cas’s footsteps on the floorboards behind him, pacing. Cas is probably staring a hole into his back, but he can’t deal with that right now, so he doesn’t.  
  
His body decides for him when the crying is over. It just kind of dries up, and the emotion recedes until it becomes background noise, something he can ignore. He keeps his back to Cas when he goes to the sink to splash cold water on his face. He’s not ready to talk yet. The water is cold and refreshing. He gets absorbed in watching it pour out of the faucet. It splinters into fragments of light in the afternoon sun and runs in a thousand directions along the delicate lines in his palms. The illusion is so carefully constructed. Amazing, really. This water isn’t water. These hands aren’t hands.  
  
That’s not a helpful line of thought. Sam turns off the faucet. He pulls a bottle of Jack and a tumbler out of the cabinet, pours a couple of fingers, and knocks it back. The whiskey isn’t whiskey, but it burns in his throat and warms his stomach just like it’s supposed to. It dulls the sharpest edges of his pain. Sam wonders if he can get drunk here. He may need to test that.  
  
For now he turns around to face Cas who, as predicted, seems to have been staring at Sam’s back the entire time.  “I’m okay now,” Sam says. He hasn’t really had time to decide whether he’s okay, but he’ll worry about it later. Right now he’s being calm and reasonable. And definitely not obsessing over how the wood of the cabinet door feels exactly like wood. “Sorry about all that.”  
  
“You handled it better than most people,” Cas says. He hesitates. “The Wall is intact?”  
  
The Wall. Sam had completely forgotten about it. He looks for it now, and comes up against the familiar tip-of-the-tongue feeling that marks its boundary. He remembers falling toward Hell and then waking up at Bobby’s. Nothing in between. Sam’s first instinct is to want it out of him, like it’s some kind of tumor, this alien mass that even death couldn’t cure him of. But that’s irrational, so he pushes it away.  
  
“Yeah, it’s there. Seems solid.” Cas looks relieved but not quite convinced. “Why is it still in me?”  
  
“Death built it into your soul. Now your soul is here.” He says it like it’s obvious, like Sam’s supposed to be all brushed up on the metaphysics of the afterlife. Heaven is severely in need of an orientation session.  
  
“Do I still need it? It’s not like I can get any deader.” Cas clearly doesn’t find that funny. But then Cas doesn’t find much funny. “I can’t go crazy in Heaven, can I?”  
  
“I don’t know. And I’d rather not find out.” Cas says it sharply, like he thinks Sam is planning to take a bulldozer to the Wall right this second.  
  
Sam holds up his hands in surrender. “Okay. Me either. No scratching.”  
  
Cas looks only marginally reassured by that promise. He’s still hovering in the doorway of the kitchen, all the way at the other end of the room. He’s usually oblivious to personal space, but he shows no sign that he’s going to come any closer. Sam crosses over and leans against the doorjamb. On the other side the initials S.W. are written in pencil over a series of horizontal lines and dates, ending in 1997. Sam wonders which of their minds created this place. Whoever it was has a great eye for detail.  
  
“So,” Sam says, “I still want to know what the fuck.” Cas shifts slightly backward into the living room, yielding Sam the doorway. He’s still watching Sam like he might bolt at any second.  
  
“The boundaries between the individual human heavens have been breaking down for some time, and there was a major failure,” Cas says. “A great many heavens collapsed, including yours. We’re in a metaphysical pocket now. A panic room, in human terms. Virtually invisible from the outside and almost impossible to break into, even for another angel.”  
  
Sam pictures the endless crowd, every one of them as lost as he’d been, wandering around under that white sky. “What happens to the people who don’t have their own personal angel to airlift them out?”  
  
“Most of them will recover from the shock eventually. A few are permanently damaged, like the ones who attacked you. You saw them as children because they’d psychologically regressed. There are packs of them all over Heaven now. Anyway, I’m sure one of your many competing military organizations will arrive on the scene soon to bring assistance.” Cas looks away. “Or to use them as cannon fodder,” he says bitterly. “The human generals seem quite excited to stage battles with soldiers who regenerate no matter how many times they’re destroyed.”  
  
“That’s . . .” Utterly horrifying? Totally predictable? Probably both. “. . . fucking depressing,” Sam says.  
  
“Yes. Although it’s fortunate for the angels. The humans turned on each other almost as soon as the first wave of them woke up. It’s the only reason that we haven’t had to abandon Heaven altogether. The one thing all the human factions seem to agree on is that they want us dead.”  
  
Sam remembers the way that the people had watched Cas. “They knew you were an angel. That’s why they turned on us.” Cas nods. “Sorry I tried to feed you to the piranha children.”  
  
“They were neither children nor fish. And you didn’t know.”  
  
Sam looks out the kitchen window. He half-expects to find the restless crowds and endless armies that he knows are out there, but all he sees is the salvage yard.  
  
“So, whose army is flying around in UFOs?” Sam asks. He almost wants to back them for their sheer creativity. Cas looks at him blankly. “Flying saucers,” Sam clarifies. He feels stupid as soon as he says the words out loud, and Cas is still clueless. It’s like they watched all those seasons of the X-Files for nothing.  
  
Sam rolls his eyes. “Spaceships. Big freaking spaceships.”  
  
“You saw spaceships? In Heaven?” Cas is bewildered and maybe concerned about Sam’s sanity. Sam’s briefly concerned about his own sanity, but the entire crowd had been screaming when the UFOs appeared. They definitely weren’t just in his head.  
  
“I’m not crazy, Cas. I know what I saw. Big, shiny, blue fucking circles flying around in the sky.”  
  
To Sam’s surprise Cas smiles. “You must have seen the two angels I was following. I was afraid they might be looking for you, but it seems they were just on the run. Probably from more of your kind. I suppose they do look rather like the spaceships on your television shows, now that you mention it. I’d never thought of that comparison before.”  
  
There’s a brief moment where Cas’s posture relaxes and his expression turns warm. But the spark doesn’t catch and then he’s just staring at Sam again. Like he’s seen a ghost, Sam thinks. He almost says it, but Cas wouldn’t get the joke. Cas’s trench coat is clean, or as clean as it ever is, and Sam wonders if at some point he had to stand over a sink and scrub Sam’s blood out of it. He probably just used his mojo. Sam doesn’t really peg him for the ‘out damn spot’ type.  
  
Sam looks down and watches his fingers flex open and closed. The nails digging into his palm feel real. But they aren’t. His hands aren’t his hands because Cas’s trench coat is clean, and the snow where his blood was has melted, and his real hands are cold ashes scattered in the woods of South Dakota. But this morning Sam was eating the goddamned awful breakfast burrito that turned out to be his last meal in a gas station outside of Vancouver. Story of Sam’s life. He blinks and the whole world rearranges itself. He woke up at Bobby’s the morning after he jumped into Hell, and suddenly everyone had eighteen months’ worth of secrets behind their eyes. Years later he still felt out of step, constantly struggling to find his place in the life Dean had built without him in the space of a single night.  
  
“How long has it been?” Sam asks.  
  
“A year.” Three days ago they were eating Chinese food in bed.  
  
“How’s Dean handling it?” He doesn’t think that Dean would crash and burn, not this time, but there’s never any guarantee of how Dean will react when it comes to Sam.  
  
“He’s still grieving,” Cas says. “But he hasn’t destroyed himself or his family.” Sam supposes that’s about the best he could hope for. Cas rubs the back of his neck, and his stare is briefly directed to the space above Sam’s shoulder.  
  
“I’ve been visiting him,” Cas says. “For the past few months. He needs me. He needs to talk to someone who knew you. I’m careful not to be followed.” He’s already on the defensive, like he expects Sam to be pissed at him for horning in on his Dean territory.  
  
“That’s great,” Sam says quickly. “You know I always wanted you two to patch things up. And If I can’t be there for Dean then I’m glad you are.” He’s glad for Cas’s sake, too. Cas doesn’t have another friend in the world.  
  
Cas softens. “I met his daughter,” he says. “I told her about the time we saw the world’s largest ball of twine.”  
  
“Good call. That’s a Winchester family classic. Dad used to take us every time we drove down U.S. 24.” Sam seldom enjoyed going to Dean’s house—there was too much temptation to resist, too many demands for performances that drained him dry—but now he aches for what he’s missing. He wants to watch Cas tell Sally stories. He wants to see her start kindergarten. Above all, he wants to have a beer with Dean. He wants to sit in Dean’s backyard and talk about cars and vegetable gardens and wendigos. He wants the weight of Dean’s hand on his shoulder and the smell of Dean’s whiskey and leather and skin lingering in his clothes for days after he leaves. For six years Dean’s house in Battle Creek had seemed impossibly far away, and now Sam would give anything to be able to pick up the phone and talk to him there.  
  
“You said my heaven collapsed,” Sam says after a moment. “My heaven is Dean’s heaven, too. Will he . . . I mean, I’m still going to see him again, right?”  
  
“Of course,” Cas says. “I nearly lost you just now. I won’t risk that again. I’ll collect his soul when he dies and bring him here, as I should’ve done for you.”  
  
“And then what? Our heaven is gone.”  
  
Cas is deeply interested in whatever it is that he sees through the living room window. “You only woke up a few minutes ago,” he says. “You should take a day or two to rest. We can discuss your options later.”  
  
“No way. I want to know now.” All the more so because Cas doesn’t want to talk about it. ‘Discuss your options’ is what you do with the doctor after he tells you that you have cancer.  
  
Cas sighs. “You’re still unsettled by what you’ve been through. You shouldn’t make such important decisions right now.”  
  
That’s both condescending and quite possibly true. “Fair enough,” Sam says. “No decisions today. Now tell me.”  
  
Cas brushes past him into the kitchen. He pulls down the whiskey bottle and refills the glass Sam left sitting next to the sink. Then he sits down at the kitchen table and pushes the glass toward the empty chair across from him. It’s like a scene from an old movie. Hell, it probably is a scene from an old movie. Everything Cas knows about handling humans he either learned from Sam and Dean or else picked up from Sam’s Netflix account.  
  
Sam takes the indicated seat. “Well?” he says.  
  
“I can rebuild your heaven here,” Cas says. “You’ll forget that this interruption ever happened and return to the permanent dream state that you experienced before the walls of your reality began to decay. I believe that I’ll be able keep you safe and prevent any further disturbances.”  
  
“Absolutely not,” Sam says. The thought of returning to that ignorant bliss makes his chest tighten with horror. Eternity alone in a box, forever reliving the same handful of moments with the shadows of the people he’s loved.  
  
“Are you so sure?” Cas says. “You were happy while it lasted.”  
  
“I’m sure.” Even talking about it makes Sam feel like he’s pinned down inside that cave. His breathing is hard to control. “Next.”  
  
Cas leans back, frustrated. “You said you weren’t going to make decisions right now.”  
  
“It doesn’t matter if I wait until tomorrow, Cas. I’ll still feel the same way. What else?”  
  
Cas looks like he wants to keep arguing, but he takes a deep breath and moves on. “You can remain conscious and wait here for Dean. I’ll visit as often as I can, but you’ll spend most of the next few decades alone.”  
  
“Or?” Sam says.  
  
“Those are your options.” Cas reaches for the untouched whiskey and swallows half of it himself.  
  
“No,” Sam says, “that can’t be all there is. My mom and dad are still out there in that mess. And Jess. What will it take to find them?”  
  
Cas looks at him like he’s a child who’s asked for a pony. “Sam, I can’t. I’d bring your whole family here if I could, but it’s not realistic.”  
  
“Fuck realistic,” Sam says. “I saw what happens to people who get lost out there. I can’t just leave them like that.”  
  
Cas’s hands open and close on the table. When he speaks he’s much too calm. “There are 100 billion human souls in Heaven,” he says, “and the realm is infinitely larger than Earth. There are no reliable lines of communication anymore. I’m an angel and it took me almost a year to find you. And you were in a fixed location. If you go out into the open the angels will hunt you down because you imprisoned Michael in Hell. And the humans will hunt you down as a traitor because you’ve consorted with me. I don’t even know what you imagine you could do. Wander around calling their names?”  
  
Sam can’t accept that. Somewhere his mother is walking across an endless plain looking for him, or getting thrown in front of the swords of an opposing army. “Come on. There has to be something.”  
  
“Return to your heaven,” Cas says. “That’s the only way for you to be with your family.”  
  
Sam’s not impressed. Being deluded into believing that he’s with the people he loves doesn’t actually make them better off.  
  
“None of this even matters,” Sam says. “Let’s say I did go back to lotus eating. What happens when Dean gets here? There’s no way he won’t want to go after Mom and Dad.”  
  
“I’ll try my best to persuade him to abandon the idea and join you.” Cas scrubs his hand over his face like he’s exhausted by the very thought.  
“And fail,” Sam says.  
  
Cas looks up with a half-smile. “Probably. Most likely it will end with me chasing him across all of Heaven. And possibly several alternate universes.”  
  
“And if I’ve taken the blue pill then I won’t be a third wheel.” Sam doesn’t know that he’s going to say that until he’s said it, and okay, maybe he’s not as zen as he assumed about Dean and Cas being best friends forever again. And not just because Sam’s now the one who has to be satisfied with second hand Dean stories. All those years when Sam wanted Cas to go to Battle Creek he stood on principle, but his “do not interfere with Dean,” Prime Directive crap went out the window as soon as Sam was gone.  
  
Cas’s expression snaps shut. “As long as you were in your heaven you never had a new thought, or feeling, or experience. I could watch you, but it was like watching a recording. We couldn’t interact. Not without waking you up. For the past year you’ve been dead to me in every way that mattered. I’m not encouraging you to go back for my benefit.”  
  
Cas picks up what was at some point supposed to be Sam’s glass of whiskey and walks over to the window. Sam’s not sure how the hell he could have known that for an angel putting a soul in its individual heaven was the equivalent of death. He hadn’t even known whether Cas would grieve for a human. He’d figured it was different when you could pop upstairs and visit whenever you wanted.  
  
Sam follows Cas, settling against the counter next to him. “I know you’re not trying to get rid of me. You know I know that. But you need to ease off the cosmic lobotomy hard sell. It’s creeping me out.”  
  
Cas shakes his head. “You don’t understand. When the time comes I’m going to have to bring Lisa’s soul here, too. Dean wouldn’t have it any other way. Nor should he, given the conditions outside.”  
  
Ah. Sam’s a third wheel after all. The one good thing about having a tree fall on him was that he was supposed to be done with this shit. God fucking damn it. Fuck everything forever.  
  
“So?” Sam says. He takes his whiskey out of Cas’s hand and kills it. Sam looks at the floor and Cas looks at Sam. They stand there like that for a minute.  
  
“We can leave if you want,” Cas says abruptly.  
  
Sam looks up. “This panic room?”  
  
“Heaven and Earth. The universe is infinite. Even I’ve only seen the smallest corners of it. I almost left when you died, but there was Dean, and someone had to watch over your soul. You wanted me to retire once. I wasn’t ready then, but I am now. So that’s your third option.”  
  
It’s a sweet offer in a weird way, but Sam’s pretty sure it’s the angelic equivalent of “let’s run away with the circus.” It’s not a real option, it’s just something you daydream about when your real options suck.  
  
“We’re not doing that,” Sam says. “Even if we did, how long do think it would be before one of us found an excuse to come back?”  
  
Cas doesn’t answer, which Sam figures is answer enough. The kitchen’s close and dark and outside the afternoon looks just like an afternoon. Sam wants to run out into it and keep running until he slams into the bars of his cage. Right. Still not a helpful line of thought.  
  
He shifts his weight and leans into Cas’s side. It’s the first time they’ve touched since Sam got here, and it’s awkward because it shouldn’t be awkward. They touch all the time. They did quite a lot of touching three days ago, as Sam remembers it. Except that he knows those three days are really a year, and the thought makes his death feel more real than anything else has. He’s not clear on the protocol here. Is it okay to assume they’re still together, or is being dead a deal breaker? Is this technically necrophilia? Cas doesn’t pull away, so there’s that.  
  
“Hey,” Sam says, “your tie is backwards.” He tugs open the crooked knot, and the gesture feels familiar and easy. Sam’s done this a thousand times. Cas’s tie is always backwards, no matter how often Sam puts it on him the right way around. Something about how his mojo renews his clothes. It used to genuinely drive Sam crazy, the same way it drove him crazy when Dean dug through his duffel bag and screwed up the color ordering of his shirts (it’s brown, blue, red, white—darkest to brightest—is that really so hard?), but the epic battle of Sam versus tie ended in a moral victory for tie years ago. Now fixing it is just a thing Sam does. He’d be sort of disappointed if it ever actually stuck.  
  
Sam’s done this a thousand times, but this time his hands aren’t his hands. They’re clumsy and useless and far too big, and they won’t stop shaking. He’s left clutching the ends of the damn tie, unable to bring them back together no matter how hard he tries. Cas peers up curiously into Sam’s face, and then lays his hand over both of Sam’s, pressing them into the base of his throat.  
  
“You seeing anyone?” Sam asks. It’s a stupid question. It’s what you ask the ex-girlfriend you still kind of like when you run into her at a coffee shop. It’s not what you ask the man you’ve had a five year relationship with twenty minutes after your latest resurrection. But he asks anyway, because he figures that’s what happens when you die: someone new moves in and fills the negative space where you used to stand. Lisa, Ruby. The thought might almost be comforting to someone who knew how to stay dead.  
  
“You were gone and Dean was married. And Bobby seems quite happy with Sheriff Mills.” Sam manages to smile a little at that. “Who would I ‘see’?”  
  
So Sam kisses him. Under the whiskey his mouth tastes like ozone. It’s lighter and sweeter than the acrid electrical short smell of the flying saucers, but it’s unmistakably the same. Cas kisses back with startling force, and Sam stumbles into the space between the counter and the wall. He narrowly misses knocking his head against the cabinet because his hands are still clutching Cas’s tie and he won’t let go to catch himself.  
  
“Let’s go upstairs,” Sam says. Cas looks him over, and for an instant Sam’s afraid that he’s going to say no out of some misplaced, chivalrous concern for Sam’s mental health. Sam doesn’t think he can handle that right now.  
  
Instead Cas says, “At least this time we won’t be interrupted.”  
  
Sam’s so relieved that he’s a little lightheaded. “Poor Bobby.” Seven weeks laid up at Singer Salvage with a bad arm was too long for celibacy, but the man hadn’t deserved to walk in on that.  
  
They end up in the same bedroom they got busted in last time because even though it only has a shitty twin-sized bed, and even though the whole house is a mirage for Sam’s benefit, this particular room is still his. Sam remembers that his duffel bag isn’t here, which means that his ropes aren’t here. He pictures a duplicate Impala out front, a duplicate bag in its duplicate trunk, with his duplicate ropes coiled up inside it.  
  
Sam’s about to say that they can’t do this yet, that he needs to find the car, but Cas grabs him by the waist and tosses him onto the bed, long limbs sprawling over the edge in every direction, and he stops worrying about where duplicate Sam would’ve parked. Cas is instantly on top of him, cool fingers resting firmly on the center of Sam’s chest. He gets Sam’s belt free in one fluid motion, graceful in this as he never is in anything else.  
  
“You want me to hurt you?”  
  
“Yes.” Sam hopes this still works here. His body isn’t his body. What if the nerve endings react differently? What if the right chemicals never hit his bloodstream?  
  
“And if you want me to stop?”  
  
Sam huffs. “Sunnydale.” They haven’t gone over the safeword before a scene in years. Cas obviously thinks Sam’s still a couple of bricks short of a wall.  
  
“Give me your hands, please.” Cas is polite, even when he’s leaving welts on Sam’s back or cutting his chest with a knife. Sam obeys and the belt cinches around his wrists, digging into his skin with a pressure that’s just at the edge of pain. It’s not enough, not nearly enough. He needs the safety of his ropes. He opens his mouth to insist, but Cas cuts him off. “You shouldn’t talk,” he says, and Sam’s teeth click shut.  
  
Cas knows what he’s doing: the ropes are just a prop Sam likes. Cas is plenty strong enough to pin Sam down under the weight of his body. He’s as heavy as a half mile of sheet of rock, as heavy as Sam’s whole life crashing down on him. Sam feels his panic swell up and overflow, and he’s fighting like he never allowed himself to fight all those years ago in the cave, thrashing and biting and trying with all his strength to throw Cas off. He’s so, so grateful that he can’t. He’s finally screaming, but it’s all right.  
  
****************************************************************************  
  
Cas checks Sam over afterward the way he always does, calmly cataloging injuries. He runs his fingers across the darkening handprint on Sam’s inner thigh and the bite mark on his collarbone, presses them gently into the five matching bruises on his throat. It occurs to Sam that if he was whole again moments after getting chomped on by piranha children then nothing Cas does with his hands and a belt can harm him. He doesn’t mention it. This is part of the ritual, too, getting inspected with quiet, efficient tenderness. It reminds him of Dean patching him up after a hunt, the groggy feeling of blood loss and Dean’s hands resting warm on his face so briefly it might be an accident, or of being feverish at four or five, when Dean would wrap him in a scratchy motel blanket and feed him microwave chicken soup.  
  
Apparently satisfied, Cas rolls Sam on his side and curls around him, rubbing his thumb along the raw red line on Sam’s wrist. Pressed together like this under the quilt the two of them just barely manage not to fall off the mattress, although the springs creak in protest every time they shift their weight. They really need to imagine themselves a more kink-friendly bed, Sam thinks, some king-sized four-poster thing with, like, a padded headboard.  
  
Sam catches Cas’s hand in his own and plays with it, bending the fingers back and forth, bringing the palm to his lips. This hand isn’t a hand. But then it never was. Never Cas’s hand, anyway. Sam’s not sure what the status of Cas’s vessel is here, whether Sam’s somehow interacting with the real thing or if it’s just another duplicate. Peel away the illusion and Sam might be spooning with a UFO. He could freak out about that—angels, stolen bodies, hidden realities, it’s his kind of freak out—but the thought skates over the surface of his mind without leaving an impression. His capacity for panic has boiled away.  
  
The muzzy, fragile peace that hits Sam after a session gradually ebbs, leaving his skin cold and his mind clear. Sooner or later, Cas is going to have to get up out of this bed and do whatever the hell it is he does when he’s not with Sam. And then Sam will be alone in this box. Sam’s not quite selfish enough to hope that Dean gets here soon—he’s got kids, for God’s sake—but Dean will get here, and Sam rolls that idea around for consideration like it’s an exotic new food that he’s not quite sure he likes. On the one hand, he’d give anything to have even five more minutes with his brother, would go through having that tree fall on him all over again, but on the other hand . . .  
  
Lisa’s not the problem. It would shake out the same way even if she’d never existed. It’s Sam. He poisons the well for everyone else just by being the fucked up thing that he is, by wanting what he can’t and shouldn’t have. This is Sam’s own personal ironic hell, spending what’s left of eternity dying of thirst, up to his neck in water that he’s not allowed to drink. The human hordes will tear apart the last angel, the glaciers will shrink and expand again, the pyramids will crumble away to dust, and Sam will still feel the same pang of desire every time Dean’s fingers linger on his skin.  
  
“Forever’s a long time,” Sam says.  
  
Sam feels Cas sigh against the back of his neck. “Yes. That’s why I thought you should consider going back into your heaven. You’ve earned the right to rest. The humans think what we did to them is so terrible. And maybe it was wrong to take away their free will, to decide for them that they should forget. But we meant well. None of us ever came up with a better way. Some people’s happiness is incompatible with the happiness of others.”  
  
It doesn’t matter. Even if Sam wanted to go back to his heaven, it’s a moot point. Dean would pour sugar into the Impala’s gas tank before he’d agree to be mindwiped, and he wouldn’t take kindly to being told that he couldn’t see Sam unless he did. Dean and Cas would have a huge fight, and at the end of it Dean would tromp into Sam’s heaven and wake him up, whether Sam liked it or not.  
  
“You know, when I realized I was dying—really dying this time, no take-backs—I was relieved.” Sam snorts. “I guess that was stupid.”  
  
Cas doesn’t answer immediately. Sam figures maybe there’s nothing to say. He doesn’t expect a response anymore by the time Cas says, "Was it deliberate?"  
  
Sam has to run that question through his head a couple of times before he gets what Cas is asking. “Jesus, Cas.” Sam rolls over so that they’re face to face. “What do you think I did? Went out to the woods and waited for a tree to fall on me? I had a whole trunk full of weapons. If I’d wanted to do that there were easier ways.”  
  
“But they wouldn’t have looked like an accident.”  
  
“That’s seriously what you think?” Sam’s not sure whether he’s worried or offended.  
  
Cas holds eye contact until Sam looks away. Cas never knows when a situation is too intimate for Sam to look at him. “Things in Heaven were falling apart,” Cas says. “I was distracted. I thought you were getting better, but afterward . . . sometimes when I thought you were getting better, I’d realize later that you’d actually been getting worse. I wondered what I’d missed.”  
  
Sam considers the possibility that Cas is right. Not right that Sam stood around and waited for a tree to fall on him, that’s ridiculous, but right that in the moment Sam saw a chance to escape his life with his dignity intact and didn’t fight as hard as could have. It’s possible—Sam’s subconscious is tricky like that—but he’s pretty sure it was genuine bad luck. Like, 95%.  
  
“You didn’t miss anything, Cas. I was okay, mostly.”  
  
And he had been. Sam sees his life more clearly now that it’s been filtered through his heaven. There was no lying, no wishful thinking or self-deception. He can see his memories gathered in luminous clusters when he was little, gradually thinning out as he hit adolescence. There’s a brilliant band of light that’s Stanford. The first couple of years after he hit the road with Dean are bright, too, in spite of the loss of Jess and Dad. When Dean makes his deal the lights start going out. Sam’s life gets darker through Ruby and Lucifer and the Apocalypse. There’s a cold blankness where the Cage isn’t, followed by a tiny, desperate spark when he’s reunited with Dean. Then Dean leaves, and for the next two years Sam’s life is a black hole. There’s nothing worth saving from his time alone or his first year with Cas. Looking back, Sam thinks that Cas must have been almost as fucked up as he was to stick around for that. He doesn’t really know. Back then Cas was just the rope around his wrists and the knife at his throat.  
  
But the lights came back. Fewer and dimmer than they’d been before, but accumulating across the years. Dean crawls around on the carpet with Sally, pretending to eat her toes, or demonstrates how to make a pie crust with leaf lard like he’s discovered the cure for cancer. Cas kisses him behind a stack of kitchen chairs in a Salvation Army thrift store, and it reminds him of nothing at all.  
  
“That last year was a good year,” Sam says. “I mean, as my years go.” Cas watches Sam with his inscrutable gaze, and Sam can’t tell if he believes a single word. “I’m sorry if you didn’t know that.”  
  
Sam wraps an arm around Cas and rolls them so that he’s lying on Cas’s chest. He strokes his thumb along the line of Cas’s furrowed brow and kisses the rough line of his jaw. He slides a hand down to fit around the angle of Cas’s hip. “Let me,” he says.  
  
Cas tips his head to look warily at the fingers resting on his temple. “You don’t need to--”  
  
“I want to.” It took Sam four years to catch on to Chinese puzzle box of Cas’s sexuality. When he finally realized that something esoteric and previously unimagined was hiding under Cas’s skin, his bombardment of questions was met with sullen, uncooperative silence. Sam had been self-righteously pissed—we’re going to have a mutualistic relationship whether you like it or not!—until Cas finally answered by taking Sam’s hands and using them to touch himself in the ways he liked. And then Sam got it: Cas wouldn’t talk to him about sex because he  _can’t_. Utterly, terrifyingly  _can’t_.  
  
The few verbal explanations that Sam has coaxed out of Cas have been abstract and weirdly mechanical. It’s got something to do with the connection between his true form and his vessel being loose, and when they’re “out of synch” his body responds to stimulation that his mind doesn’t enjoy. Or something. Sam’s still vague on all the whys and wherefores. He finds himself imagining Cas as a house with faulty wiring. Too much, too fast, and the circuit breakers overload and the whole thing shuts down. It takes time and thought and a delicate touch, and even with all your best efforts you might not get it to run. Sam’s decided that he’s okay with that. He’s always liked fixing things.  
  
The slow, careful sex Cas needs doesn’t really satisfy Sam. Even back before he drove around with a coil of rope in his trunk he’d liked it hard and fast. It takes brute force to shut down his overactive brain. When it works for Cas like it does now, though, it’s worth it. His pleasure is shiny as a new penny when he finds it, and afterward he’s warm and yielding, briefly at one with his troublesome body. It makes Sam feel powerful, in the humbling way that it feels powerful to hold something important in your hands and be trusted not to fuck it up. He basks in the reflected light of Cas’s afterglow. Sex hasn’t given him that kind of animal happiness since he was twenty-two. At best he feels better afterward, not good. He takes the orgasms Cas gives him like medicine.  
  
Cas is looking at him, even now, but his gaze is soft, almost human. He blinks slowly, as if he were sleepy, although he has no need for sleep. His eyelash brushes against the side of Sam’s hand. Like this, Sam can see him as a man, one who’s going to get up tomorrow and go do a lot of brave, stupid things that’ll probably get him killed. And Sam can see him as a billion year old blue circle that dreams of retiring someplace beyond the stars, but that never, ever will. For now, at least, Sam accepts them both.  
  
“Maybe you were right,” Sam says. “Maybe we should leave here. I read about how there’s a liquid ocean on Europa under the ice. If we went there we could be the first people to see alien life and—“  
  
“Sam,” Cas says. He doesn’t really need to add that they’re not going to Europa.  
  
“Yeah, I know.” He sinks back down onto the bed. “Can I even sleep here, or am I just supposed to stare at the ceiling for old time’s sake?”  
“Stop talking and you’ll find out.”  
  
Sam settles into the crook of Cas’s arm. “I think that’s the politest way anyone’s ever told me to shut the fuck up.”  
  
“Good.”  
  
***********************************************************  
  
Sam must be able to sleep because he wakes up with the afternoon light in his face and Cas standing over him fully dressed.  
  
“Bat signal?” Sam asks. Cas doesn’t seem to understand him, even though Sam’s made this joke before. Hell, Sam’s explained this joke before. There’s obviously no point in going over it again.  
  
“I have to go,” Cas says. “I’ll come back as soon as I can. Don’t wander off.”  
  
“I’m not a toddler in a grocery store,” Sam says.  
  
“If you get lost I may not be able to find you.” He’s worried. A control freak, but worried. Sometimes life with Cas isn’t that different from life with Dean.  
  
“I can’t promise that I’m not going to look for my family. But if that’s what I decide, I’ll tell you. You won’t just come back and find me gone.” Cas bows his head in acceptance and disappears. He’s never been one for grand goodbyes.  
  
The instant Sam is alone he thinks of a thousand questions he forgot to ask. What does ‘wander off’ even mean? Cas obviously thinks that Sam can leave the panic room if he wants to, but Sam has no idea how. How far can he walk before he ends up somewhere that he’s not supposed to be? Or does distance even work like that here? He’s suddenly afraid to go outside. Does he get television reception? Radio? Are the books in the library real? Why is it still afternoon when he’s been here for hours?  
  
Sam gazes out the bedroom window at the salvage yard below. The sunlight on his hand feels just like sunlight. The cars look just like cars. For a long time he stands there in silence. He waits for the empty spaces to fill up with milling crowds. He waits for the UFOs to land. Nothing happens.  
  
Sam wonders if there’s such a thing as a ghost dog. Maybe he’ll get one.


End file.
